Researching Ethnicity, Identity, Subjectivity: Anything ...

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Researching Ethnicity, Identity, Subjectivity: Anythingbut the Four Lettered Word

Elizabeth Pilar Challinor

To cite this version:Elizabeth Pilar Challinor. Researching Ethnicity, Identity, Subjectivity: Anything but the Four Let-tered Word. Ethnic and Racial Studies, Taylor

Francis (Routledge), 2011, PP (PP), pp.1. �10.1080/01419870.2011.593641�. �hal-00721225�

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00721225

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Researching Ethnicity, Identity, Subjectivity: Anything but

the Four Lettered Word

Journal: Ethnic and Racial Studies

Manuscript ID: RERS-2010-0511.R1

Manuscript Type: Original Manuscript

Keywords: Cape Verde, Immigrants, Identity, racial identification, Racism, emotions

URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers [email protected]

Ethnic and Racial Studies

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Researching Ethnicity, Identity, Subjectivity: Anything but the

Four Lettered Word

The article gives a frank account of how anthropological research on Cape Verdean migrant experiences of parenthood in Portugal developed from avoiding the use of the analytical concept of ‘race’ to encountering ‘race’ as a category of practice in fieldwork and discusses the implications of this for analyzing the data. Although the aim of the research was to look beyond categorizations, to explore the emotional dimensions of lived experience, the effects of ‘racial automatisms’ upon migrant subjectivities cannot be ignored. Racist effects are nonetheless distinguished from racist intentions. The ethnography elucidates the political potential of ‘race’ to foment critical reflection upon the relationship between an individual’s personal and collective identities.

Key words: Cape Verde, immigrants, identity, racial identification, racism, emotions

Introduction

As a mother who had enjoyed two home births in the United Kingdom and

‘suffered’ a hospital birth in Portugal, I was familiar with the disempowering

effects of medicalisation and decided to research Cape Verdean women’s

experiences in Portugal. Their ability to secure a degree of control over the birth

process was likely to be further compromised by the fact that they were

foreigners, immigrants, Cape Verdean, African….Clearly, implicit in my

reasoning were some ideas about ‘race’ and ‘racism’ but I did not use either of

these terms in my research proposal. It did not even cross my mind to mention

‘race’ because I had long left it behind as a useful concept. Having learnt my

anthropological lesson, regarding the arbitrariness of phenotypcial classifications

(Wade 1993) and concurring with the deconstruction of Afro-centrism (Gilroy

1993), I had no time for the unpleasant colonial connotations of ‘race’.

Notions of ‘race’ are integral to identity formation and viewing race as a

social construction enables us to examine the ways in which ex-colonized people

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have been racialized as ‘other’ and how this impacts upon their sense of self. Yet,

I did not want this to be the central focus of my work. I feared that researching

racism would result in examinations of counter-identities readily available for

even more social deconstruction. I was tired of the constructivist approach that

had dominated identity studies. Keen to avoid engaging in ping-pong

deconstructions of oppositional categories, I intended to engage, at a deeper level,

with the subjectivities of the women’s experiences and so naively dismissed the

four lettered word ‘race’ from my mind. I later realized that the omission of ‘race’

had a name - new racism - critiqued by anti-racist scholars, for contributing to a

blind universalism which overlooks difference in the name of equality or

humanism1. As a European white scholar, my dismissal of ‘race’ thus gained an

unpleasant significance, contrary to my intentions.

This article discusses the different ways in which ‘race’ and ‘racism’

emerged in the fieldwork and explore its significance for the study of subjectivity.

Researching ‘Cape Verdeans’ in Porto

The original aim was to focus on the intercultural context of childbirth for Cape

Verdean women. The exploratory interviews conducted raised a wider range of

issues such as economic hardship, childcare, and dealing with state bureaucracy

which offered equally rich ethnographic material as that of the birth process. The

fieldwork consisted of conducting interviews and accompanying women in their

appointments with health professionals, social workers and state officials. I also

interviewed Cape Verdean fathers.

Despite turning my back on ‘race’, in the choice of Cape Verdean

immigrant mothers as a category of analysis, there was an underlying assumption

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that the data would generate subjective experiences of ‘racism’. Aware of this

contradiction; it did not worry me because, as a researcher, I felt ‘protected’ by

the privileged insights gained from subscribing to the alternative analytical

concept of ‘ethnicity’ which had a feel good ring to it and ‘avoided the nasty

baggage that the concept of race brought with it’ (Wade 2002:3). As Banton

explains, (cited in Cashmore 2003:143) the difference between an ethnic group

and a ‘race’ is that ‘the former reflects the positive tendencies of identification and

inclusion where the latter reflects the negative tendencies of dissociation and

exclusion.’ With an appeased conscience, I could then focus my attention on

‘subjectivity’, knowing where I stood in relation to ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’.

What about identity? Brubaker’s (2004:4) description of the concept’s

analytical impasse – meaning too much in a ‘strong’ positivist sense and too little

in a ‘weak’ constructivist sense – helped me to understand my own dwindling

lack of interest in researching ‘identity’. Subjectivity, on the other hand, appeared

to constitute a more promising concept for an ‘experience-near’ analysis of

immigrant motherhood, going beyond categorizations to explore ‘depth of

personhood’ (Biehl, Byron and Kleinman: 2007:13) through the ‘inner dialogue’

(Archer 2000). Yet, just because I had kept the analytical concept of ‘race’ at bay,

this did not mean that I could ignore its social life in the field.

At the onset of fieldwork, I was faced with the challenge of how to contact

Cape Verdean women. There are hardly any Cape Verdean neighbourhoods in

Porto, due to a social housing programme that relocated Cape Verdeans

throughout the town.

Initial contacts were made through a Cape Verdean Association in Porto

and the University Chaplaincy that had provided financial support to single

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mother students. The Chaplaincy put me in contact with James Beard, an

anthropologist who was in the final stages of his fieldwork on African immigrants

in Porto. He offered to take me to African hairdressers to distribute a flier I had

produced to advertise my research. These initial contacts marked the beginning of

my re-awakening to the concept of ‘race’.

A Gentle Nagging

A researcher quoted in Darlington and Scott (2002.85) had included a graphic on

her flier so that the homeless people in her study would associate it with her work

without having to read any text. Inspired by this idea, I used a picture of a

pregnant ‘African’ woman from a magazine on the internet. She wore a long

swaying dress, in pale green, standing sideways in an artistic pose, with her right

hand on her swollen stomach. A rectangular hand bag hung off her left shoulder

and her hand rested on its patterned fabric, displaying a thick golden colored

bangle. A wide head band, made of the same fabric as the handbag, pushed her

hair back and up into a bunch of thick black curls and she wore large oval shaped

golden ear rings. Her facial features were displayed in an artistic silhouette form

in pale brown. Underneath this image, I briefly introduced the research and

myself.

Aware that I could face copyright problems, should I wish to publish an

article with a copy of the flier, I also asked a Portuguese artist friend if she could

produce a similar picture. Ana produced an image of a pregnant woman standing

slightly sideways, wearing a pick tunic and jeans, her left arm cradling a young

child at her side whose head was decorated with a number of small plaits. She had

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a discreet grey handbag, small ear ring and blue head band that framed her face

which revealed bright pink thick lips, wide nostrils and piercing brown eyes. Ana

explained that she had found the magazine picture I sent her too exotic and had

decided to produce something more natural.

Unsure which image was best, I used them both and in subsequent

meetings with different women found that the majority preferred the original

image, although some women preferred Ana’s picture. The images were generally

seen to represent ‘European’ Africans versus ‘African’ Africans which brought to

mind Meintel’s (1984) picture tests of racial classifications in Cape Verde.

The women I met in the hairdressers came from a range of African

countries. ‘We are all African’, claimed one woman. ‘The Angolan community is

much bigger’ affirmed another. I declined their invitations to include other

nationalities in the study, on the grounds that a boundary had to be drawn which

also ran the risk of imposing unsolicited inclusions. Several women refused to

participate in my study and I wondered whether labelling them as ‘Cape Verdean’

jarred with their own ‘internal definitions’ (Jenkins 1994). I also knew that I was

guilty of what Brubaker (2004:8) calls ‘groupism’: ‘…the tendency to treat ethnic

groups, nations and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can

be attributed’. Did these women experience the ‘Cape Verdean’ label as an

obstacle to their integration into Portuguese society?

Despite my academic condemnation of phenotype as a basis for ‘racial’

classification, there were occasions when I approached ‘African’ looking women

to ask them whether they were Cape Verdean. On another occasion, I failed to talk

to a Cape Verdean mother in a party because the paleness of her skin led me to

believe she was European. Although I dismissed this embarrassing incident in my

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mind as a missed opportunity to meet another Cape Verdean mother, I knew that

the issue of race was gently nagging. Deconstructing the category of ‘Cape

Verdean’ women was a necessary theoretical challenge although it also sometimes

clashed with the practical need to meet ‘Cape Verdean’ women in the field.

Encountering ‘Race’ in the Field

The vignettes described below, from fieldwork conducted between April 2008 and

May 2009, reveal the need to address ‘race’ and ‘racism’ as part of a broader

framework for examining the interplay between collective identities and

individual subjectivities.

‘It is important to show who you are’

Joaquim, eager to return to Cape Verde, claimed people’s view of Africa is

conditioned by the bad news on television. (The head of the army and the

president of Guinea-Bissau had both been assassinated days before and gruesome

images of vestiges of the president’s brutal assassination had appeared on the

television). Joaquim gave an example of the ‘silly’ questions that his colleagues at

university – ‘educated people’, he hastened to add - had asked him. ‘Does Cape

Verde have roads?’ In the gymnasium, someone had asked what kind of clothes

they wore in Cape Verde and Joaquim had replied that they wore the same as the

Portuguese, or better.

I enquired whether he had experienced any racism. Joaquim replied, ‘not

really racism but rather prejudice’. He claimed not to have many problems

because he was very positive by nature and knew how to get on with people,

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adding that it is important to show who you are. His colleagues at university were

very impressed when he received high grades. When he had the same grade as a

Portuguese colleague, they were more impressed with him because he was black

and ‘managed to do it’. Later, I asked what the difference was between racism and

prejudice and after thinking for a while Joaquim replied, ‘Prejudice is not the right

word, it is more a question of fear’.

‘See (what I mean)?’

Silvia stood, in her local health centre, with her two year old daughter, near a

door, out of which came a nurse.

‘Who’s next?’

‘It’s me’ replied Silvia, ‘I did not bother to pull out a ticket because

nobody else was here’.

The nurse turned to look at a young white man standing behind us who

held up a ticket. ‘But you should have’ he replied and after hesitating for a

moment, signalled to the young man to go in and asked Silvia to wait for the other

nurses.

‘See?’ she said in a tone of contempt.

We had been talking about how Silvia did not want to stay in Portugal

because she did not feel able to realize her full potential. In the chemist where she

works, she claimed that she had no chances of progressing in her career because,

even though she had acquired Portuguese nationality, she was still seen as a

foreigner. Maybe back in Cape Verde she could open her own chemist.

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After we had left the health centre, Silvia mentioned the nurse’s attitude

again: ‘He was rather rude, don’t you think? But, you know, he was always like

that. Last time he was unable to weigh Cláudia because she wouldn’t let him. I

didn’t lose out by having the other nurses’.

It was impossible to know whether the nurse would have acted differently

if Silvia had been a white Portuguese woman or if the young man had been in

Silvia’s position. There were not only issues of race and gender to be considered

here. What had gone through the nurse’s own mind whilst he hesitated? Was he

contemplating the prospects of failing to weigh the little girl once more? I only

had access to Silvia’s thoughts which suggested that she had interpreted his

actions as ‘racist’. Yet, since I did not ask her directly, I could not be sure. So a

few days later, I sent her a text and asked if she had felt that his behaviour could

be seen as slightly racist. She replied as follows:

‘I don’t think it was due to racism. He is just like that, he is unpleasant, but

I think it is just him, poor thing’.

‘I suggest you remove the words “black race”’

A paediatrician I met whilst accompanying a Cape Verdean mother to an

appointment in a health centre expressed a keen interest to become involved on a

voluntary basis in my work. Frustrated by the small number of babies referred to

her by her colleagues – who were all general practitioners - she decided to

formulate a formal request to her superiors to set aside one day a week for Cape

Verdean infants. The paediatrician sent me a draft of the letter by email and told

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me to feel free to suggest any amendments. I suggested eliminating the words

‘black race’ from the following text:

…The applicant is available, as a Paediatrician, for: - Health evaluation related to possible pathologies prevalent in the black race and region of origin - Cape Verde…

I hesitated before sending the mail, not only for fear of offending her, but

also because I had no idea what the current situation was regarding the

relationship between ‘race’ and medical genetic research. I had some vague ideas

about the IQ tests in the Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray (in Hacking 2005)

and this in the end gave me the courage to send the mail.

‘They do their best to treat you correctly’

Diana invited me to accompany her to the immigration authorities for the renewal

of her visa which had expired nearly a year ago. She was finding it difficult to

explain, in Portuguese, to the satisfaction of the immigration authorities, the

complex circumstances that had led to this situation. ‘I feel shy’ she explained to

me, in Creole, ‘I can’t express everything that I feel. Portuguese is our official

language, but there are certain words that may be different to theirs and they don’t

understand what I want to say’.

Diana believed that if I accompanied her she would be treated better.

‘When you come with a white person, they think that the companion is an

educated person and so they do their best to treat you correctly’. I had noted, on

occasions, how officials tended to direct their words more to me than to the

women concerned.

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‘There is no need to involve a white person in our affairs’

The president of the Cape Verdean Association made this statement, in private, to

Diana during my brief absence from his office. I had taken Diana there to see if

she qualified for food aid distributed by the association. Diana only disclosed his

words to me months later, after I had helped to resolve problems with renewing

her visa: ‘Black people’s problems, we resolve amongst ourselves’.

The president had made no efforts to introduce me to the Cape Verdean

mothers he knew and I had presumed, at first, it was because he was too busy.

Diana’s confiding of the president’s words helped me to understand the first time

he had actively attempted to obstruct my work, at a later date, when the president

tried to prevent me from speaking at the Cape Verdean Christmas show.

During one of the intervals, it occurred to me to suggest to a mother that

she ask the president if we could speak together about our group. She returned

with a blank expression on her face, reporting that he had refused but had offered

to allocate a time for the group to meet, at the association headquarters. (The

group had its own meeting place in a home for single mothers where three Cape

Verdean women lived and which had a playroom for the children). I decided to

approach the president myself. Once again he refused on the grounds that last

minute initiatives were unacceptable; they would delay the scheduled

performances which were already behind time. I pointed out that nothing was

happening at that moment and that it would not even take five minutes to talk. He

still refused. I then replied that for me this was a golden opportunity for my

research to meet more women and he finally agreed, telling me to stand by the

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door and wait for his signal. He then disappeared. Time went by, nothing

happened. I approached a woman who was standing on the stage, wistfully

holding a microphone, waiting to present the next performance. I asked if we

could speak and she replied that the president had not given us authorization. I

assured her that he had changed his mind but she said that without speaking with

him, she could not override his decision. I stood waiting on the stage, with a Cape

Verdean mother until the president emerged, nodded his head in our direction and

we were handed the microphone and began to talk. Suddenly loud music came out

through the curtains behind us, drowning out our words. We popped our heads

back stage and the music was switched off. When we finished talking and walked

past the president, he said to me ‘You will have to pay me a thousand dollars for

this’.

‘Democracy works for Europeans, not for Africans’

One Saturday afternoon group meeting, we had arranged to exchange infants’

clothes. Whilst I approached Porto in my car, it was pouring with rain. I began to

receive text messages from mothers asking for lifts to the meeting. Not totally

familiar with Porto, I lost my way in the process of giving lifts, arriving over an

hour late, with a carful of mothers and their babies and two suitcases of clothes. I

noted that a Cape Verdean father and his Portuguese wife were attending for the

first time. Somewhat stressed by the whole situation, I emptied out the suitcases

and everyone started looking at the clothes. This set the tone for the rest of the

meeting after which it became difficult to hold our planned group discussion.

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At the end of our uncharacteristically disorganised meeting, Tiago – the

first father to participate in a meeting – sat down beside me and suggested that

next time it might be better to leave the freebies until the end. Embarrassed by my

shambolic ‘performance’, I showed him the open ended questionnaire I had

prepared on possible activities for the group and had completely forgotten to hand

out. He praised my initiative but then went on to say that if I wanted anything to

happen at all then I would have to take more control over the whole process.

Tiago told me that Africans are like sheep, they need a leader to follow and

suggested that I set an agenda for the meeting and allocate tasks to people:

‘Democracy works for Europeans, not for Africans’. He asked me if I knew the

president of the Cape Verdean Association and told me that his was a good

example to follow.

‘“Sampadjudu” is more beautiful’

I interviewed Sara on a bench in the park because she did not want me to go to her

home where she had fallen out with her neighbours. They had all got on well

before her partner had left her, pregnant, for another woman, with whom he was

also expecting a baby. But Sara’s failure to tell them her ‘badiu’ husband had left

was interpreted as an indication of the typical superiority complex of the

‘sampajudu’. Now, whenever she put foot outside of her shelter, her ‘badiu’

neighbours called her names. ‘You have lived in Cape Verde’, she remarked ‘so I

don’t need to tell you about the rivalry that exists between sampajudu and badiu’.

‘Sampajudu’ is used to designate the Cape Verdeans originated from the

windward islands and ‘Badiu’ to refer to the Cape Verdeans from the leeward

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islands which have a stronger African influence. Sara, daughter of a sampajudu

and badiu, born in the windward island of São Vicente, identified herself as

sampajudu and went on to explain the rivalry to me in the following terms:

‘They are jealous because sampajudu is more beautiful. Sampajudu is

white, blue, green eyes, thinner hair…’

‘Oh, they say that sampajudu is more beautiful?’

‘No, sampajudu is more beautiful. I don’t know if you know but Badiu has

thicker hair’.

The day following our interview, Sara sent me a text message claiming

that she had had a row with a neighbour who had seen her with me and exclaimed

‘you’re friends with a white woman; I am going to make your life hell’.

Making Sense of the Data

How am I to make sense of these encounters with ‘race’? Firstly, they reveal the

impossibility of ignoring the influence of race as a ‘category of practice’

(Brubaker 2004:31) upon the ways in which social actors make sense of

themselves and of others. Secondly, they serve to question the notion that racist

behaviour is synonymous with racist intent.

Automatic Responses

Let us consider the case of Sara which portrays the racial disharmony between

badiu and sampajudu as a cultural given. Sara’s description of the inferiority of

the badiu phenotype corroborates Meintel’s (1984:104) findings regarding the

existence of ‘a value-laden hierarchy in which ‘white’ skin and features are

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aesthetically superior to ‘black’ ones’. Yet, we know that relations with her badiu

neighbours, with whom she lived in close proximity, were agreeable until Sara’s

neighbours took offence by her refusal to share the misfortune of her private life

with them. Sara had failed to meet the unspoken social expectations of reciprocity

that may develop amidst neighbours living in precarious conditions in such close

proximity. It could thus be argued that the easiest way for Sara’s neighbours to

make sense of her silence and for Sara to understand their reactions was to take

recourse to racial stereotypes due to what Brubakaer calls the ‘hyperaccessibility’

of ethnic schemas for interpreting the social world which crowds out the

possibility of alternative interpretations. He suggests that it may be more fruitful

to view the deployment of racial stereotypes as a ‘quasi-automatic

unselfconscious process’ that is ‘triggered’ in particular contexts which may not

necessarily indicate a ‘need to feel superior to others’ (2004:72-78).

Desai’s poignant study of Asian masculinities in Britain provides a

fascinating example of how the ‘trigger’ for racialised interpretations is not to be

found in rational deployments of the concept of ‘race’ but rather in ‘embodied

processes which by-pass rational thought’ (1999:32).

Desai takes recourse to Bourdieu (1984) on bodily memory for analysing

the ways in which individual bodily gestures symbolize other gestures and

practices so that a simple ‘look’ may evoke a particular kind of masculine identity

that challenges the power of another man from a rival group and thus triggers an

act of violence between white and Bengali young men without even the need for

recourse to verbal conflict (1999:253). Desai argues that the analyst must be wary

of imputing too much substance to the racialised interpretations of social actors

for fear of missing what else is going on (1999:20).

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Was ‘racial motivation’ the real cause of the association president’s words

or is this another example of the hyperacessibility of ‘ethnic competition schemas’

(Brubaker 2004:78)? Did my insistence upon being allowed to talk in public with

my embodied presence upon the stage ‘trigger’ historical memories of colonial

domination? How were gender relations at work here? Did my insistence also

challenge the president’s masculinity?

Although I cannot answer all of these questions, more context of what else

was going on may shed some light on the matter. The president made it no secret

that his position constituted a spring board for the potential acquisition of a

political post in his planned return to Cape Verde. In this respect, he could see me

as an obstacle or potential rival by weakening his command over the Cape

Verdean Diaspora in Porto, irrespective of whether I was ‘black’ or ‘white’. The

experience of a young black Cape Verdean male student gives weight to this

interpretation. Having written a dissertation for his degree on African associations

in Porto, the student commented to me that he had given up on the president who

had been of no help whatsoever and had only displayed interest in him as a

potential source of labour. By separating out intentionality from effect, we may

thus conclude that the president’s motivation for making his racist comments

about whites was not due to pure racism.

How are we to interpret Tiago’s comments on democracy? Firstly, his

words need to be understood within the context of Cape Verde’s political history.

Cape Verde, which gained independence from Portugal in 1975, is a

young democracy. The first multi-party elections took place in 1991. I describe

elsewhere (Challinor 2005) how the habitus of single party politics continued

some time after the change of regime. The polarization of Cape Verdean

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democracy, between the two major parties, continues to be the subject of debate.

In a conference given by Jorge Fonseca - a former independent candidate to the

presidency of Cape Verde - in May 2009, in Porto, Fonseca testified to the on-

going political polarization of social life which he exemplified by stating that even

at a wedding people are likely to ask you whether you are MPD2or PAICV3. He

added that if you claim to be independent, people will still insist that you have to

say which party you are more inclined towards. His remarks were met with

laughter in the audience and a young Cape Verdean student sitting next to me

exclaimed ‘It’s true!’

Secondly, the specific circumstances of a disorganised meeting also

provide a clue, bringing to mind the literature on the paradoxes inherent in the

ideal of non-directive participatory processes (Cooke and Kothari 2001). The line

between facilitation and manipulation is often difficult to draw. The motivation

behind Tiago’s decision to give advice was to help the group to function more

effectively: people need to be told what to do. The easiest way to get his message

across to me that I shouldn’t be afraid of giving out orders was to argue that

democracy was culturally inappropriate for Africans. The effects of his pep talk

may nonetheless be seen as racist: construing Africans to be inferior to Europeans

because they are incapable of taking initiatives on their own. His advice also set

him apart from the average African, implicitly claiming a superior status for

himself. Originally badiu, he did not speak in Crioule to his young daughter, born

to a Portuguese mother who expressed concern in the group of how to expose her

daughter to Cape Verdean culture.

The automatisms examined by Brubaker and Desai help to understand how

situations and events may unexpectedly become racialised in a wide range of

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different contexts and warn against imputing too much intentionality when social

actors take recourse to racist resources.

My impulse to suggest to the paediatrician that she remove the words

‘black race’ from her letter may also be seen as a quasi-automatic response by an

anthropologist distrustful of the four lettered word.

I don’t know whether my advice was taken on board or not (neither of us

commented upon the issue) but I have since learnt that medical research indicates

that there may be grounds for talking of a ‘race-targeted’ as opposed to ‘race-

based’ medicine (Hacking 2005).

Hacking’s claim that ‘race’ may be a valuable indicator of the potential

effectiveness of a drug is worth consideration since it need not be interpreted as a

sign of genetic determinism. In his thoughtful study (2002) on the dialectic

relationship between culture and nature, Wade points out that the identification of

predictable and consistent patterns – such as the higher blood pressure of African

American men – is not only about biology but also about consistent patterns in the

cultural context. Whilst this may come of no surprise to the anthropologist,

naturally allergic to biological essentialisms, (forgive the provocative metaphor),

Wade’s point is that not all biologists subscribe to them either and that there are

currents within the discipline that examine how ‘human biology is constituted

through social processes’ (Wade, 2002:115). The argument is taken further by

Ingold who claims that differences between cultures ‘are themselves biological’

since ‘they emerge in the process of development of the human organism in its

environment’ ([Ingold, 2000:379] cited in Wade, 2002:115).

Yet, if social actors are more than what culture and biology make of them,

this is due to the human capacity to reflect upon society and nature.

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The Reflexive Self

My focus on subjectivity signals an attempt to apprehend the emotional

dimensions of lived experience but it is not intended as a narrow pseudo-

psychological approach towards self-understanding. On the contrary, it aims to

explore the ways in which the collective and the individual are intertwined.

Archer (2000:195, 10) defines emotions as ‘commentaries upon our

concerns’, arguing that ‘we are who we are because of what we care about’.

Choices have to be made, primary concerns need to be separated from secondary

concerns and this is achieved through the never-ending ‘inner conversation’ which

tests our commitments against our different emotional commentaries. It is the self

that arbitrates upon the relative importance of different commitments,

conditioned, but not determined, by the self’s involuntary placement in the world:

…the “I” may be distressed to learn that its “Me” is considered…to be of a disfavoured colour or gender, and that nothing “I” can immediately do will change matters…As a reflexive monitor, the “I” may squirm inwardly to distance itself from the disfavoured “Me”…(2000:264-265).

The ‘inner conversation’, part of the process of constructing one’s

subjectivity, is inseparable from social structures and interactions. We have seen

how the ‘I’ of José, Silvia and Diana had to deal with the ‘external definitions’

(Jenkins 1994) of their ‘Me’. Racial automatisms may thus be seen to be a part of

the social structure that impacts upon subjectivities. In the words of Brubaker

(2004:86):

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The domain of the “mental” is not identical with the domain of the individual…the schemes of perception and interpretation through which the social world is experienced in racial, ethnic or national terms – is social in a double sense: it is socially shared knowledge of social objects (emphasis in original).

And yet this socially shared knowledge may also be disputed. In certain

circumstances the self evaluates schemes of perception in terms of its primary and

secondary concerns. Diana’s readiness to share with me the association

president’s ‘dispensing of whites’, for example, suggests that the ‘ethnic

competition schema’ that the president had invoked failed to engage her.

Joaquim’s statement ‘you have to show who you are’ demonstrates a

conscious attempt to overcome the obstructions caused by external, racial

categorizations. His words also reveal Joaquim’s personal identity at work -

tending to its self-worth in society. Both Silvia and Diana testify to José’s

experience of having to deal with the effects of external categorization upon their

agency and sense of self. Diana claimed that the mere presence of a white person

accompanying her guaranteed superior quality of assistance and Silvia believed

she was unable to progress in her career because she was not originally

Portuguese.

The changes in Silvia’s reactions to the nurse’s behaviour provide a

window into the workings of the ‘internal conversation’ (Archer 2000),

elucidating the dialectical relationship between external racialised categories and

subjectivities. Silvia’s comment, ‘See (what I mean?)’ suggests that her initial

perception of the nurse’s behaviour was conditioned by previous experiences in

which she felt she had been treated unfairly for not being Portuguese. Her initial

reaction to the nurse’s behaviour could thus be seen as an automatic racialised

response to previous subjective experiences of ‘racism’. Silvia’s personal identity

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was protesting against the lack of recognition of her self-worth in Portuguese

society. My questioning whether she felt the nurse’s behaviour had been racist

provided an opportunity to engage with her ‘inner conversation’ which led her to

change her mind.

Joaquim’s feeling that he posed a threat to his colleagues’ own sense of

self by challenging their ‘racial automatisms’ regarding the inferior capacities of

blacks may be interpreted in the light of Suleri’s (1992:6) analysis of how colonial

fear of its own cultural ignorance of India was fetishized into latent threats posed

by the ‘other’. She claims the ‘cultural exchanges’ between ruler and ruled

produced a counter-culture that blurred the dividing line between ‘self’ and

‘other’. Subscribing to the idea of an impenetrable ‘other’ helped to keep the

unsettling reality of these ‘imperial intimacies’ at bay. Upholding the myth of the

steadiness of imperial control consequently resulted in an anxious drive to

interpret the ‘other’ culture in the colonizers’ own terms (1992:7).

The attempts to render Cape Verdean culture readable in their own terms,

by enquiring how people dressed and whether Cape Verde had roads also

appeared to jar on Joaquim’s own sense of self, provoking indignation.

Mothers’ and babies’ names also produced reactions that invoked

‘impenetrable otherness’ (Suleri 1992). I observed several instances where doctors

and social workers commented upon mothers’ and babies’ ‘weird’ or ‘unusual’

names. Several mothers answered to one name in their relations with Cape

Verdean friends and to another name in more formal relations. One mother

commented how she had stopped calling her son by his first name because her

Portuguese housemates, in the single mothers’ home where she lived, had

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complained that it was too difficult to pronounce. Now, she had become used to

calling him by his second, typically Portuguese, name.

Reflexivity does not only signify the human capacity to reflect upon one’s

place within the world, but also, the capacity to seek to transform it. ‘One of the

greatest of human powers is that we can subjectively conceive of re-making

society and ourselves’ (Archer 2000:315). Commenting upon the lack of

acceptance, in Portuguese society, of mixed ‘race’ couples, a black Cape Verdean

father, who was expecting a baby with a white Portuguese woman, told me, with a

big smile on his face, ‘the world is going to become a more colourful place’.

Conclusion

Conducting research is like walking in a labyrinth of on-going

experimentation. I have attempted to portray a sense of this through discussing my

changing attitude towards the concept of ‘race’. Cashmore (2003:334) claims it is

problematic to substitute ‘race’ for ‘ethnicity’ because the former constitutes an

important idiom for combating racism which may also be disguised in

ethnocentric claims to cultural rather than racial superiority. Distinguishing racist

motivation from racist effects constitutes, nonetheless, a significant analytical

nuance: if on the one hand it helps to see what else is happening, on the other

hand it suggests that racist attitudes can change. Tiago’s Portuguese partner

commented to me that in the small town where they lived near Porto, it was

common to hear people say ‘He is black but he is a good person’. Is this pure

racism or an indication of the ‘personal commentator’ questioning racial

stereotypes in the face of lived experience?

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Whatever their intention may be, these kinds of comments can still be

hurtful. This is evident in the following edited extract from an interview I

conducted with Pedro who worked in a restaurant to finance his master’s studies.

In response to my question if he liked living in Portugal, he had complained about

the police’s tendency to stop black drivers.

Challinor: What about people in general? Do you feel they treat you well? Pedro: Yes, I have Portuguese friends who treat me well but at work, there are others who come with an attitude, with a way of treating a black person that is different, but I usually notice immediately and then I speak up. I don’t keep it to myself because I can’t stand it. Challinor: What do you normally say? Can you recall an incident? Pedro: Well, where I work now there is a cleaner, she is so stupid that when the boss or one of the employees draws her attention to something that is not right she says ‘oh do you think I am a black woman?’ She sometimes says this in front of me! Once in the restaurant...we were all having lunch together...the cook’s food that day was not very good...and she commented that she was now cooking for black men and women. She said this in front of me! Those kinds of things really affect me. I had to let it out; there are some things which you just can’t accept. Challinor: So what did you say? Pedro: I told her she was just a cleaner, and that she is no better than any black woman anywhere and that no black women has the bad manners that she has because if she were educated she wouldn’t speak like that. Then she started to cry and apologized. This happened twice. She said it wasn’t intended for me and she didn’t mean to offend me. But what is this about? “You are not black. All my family is black. You don’t need to speak directly to me. It is enough to say black and you have already shocked me”. We used to be very good friends but then it all ended....There are lots of people who are scared and there are others who think that blacks are all the same, but in reality, this is not true because everyone is different. Each person has a completely different education, some people do good things, and others do bad things irrespective of whether they are black or white.

The inability of the Portuguese cleaner to understand why Pedro took

offence and his refusal to accept her explanation demonstrate how the meanings

of ‘race’ are not set in the structure of language but are activated through social

interaction. The claims that her comments were not directed personally towards

Pedro suggest that the cleaner was engaged in a non-reflexive process that drew

on the racial stereotypes embedded in some popular Portuguese expressions.

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Pedro’s attempts to make the cleaner aware of how her words offended him, by

stating that all his family was black, reveal how, in this particular social

interaction, he was not prepared to dissociate his personal identity from a

collective black identity. He then went on to do this in his comments to me, on

how blacks are not all the same. Despite their arbitrariness, the phenotypical

markers of ‘race’, such as skin colour, function, in practice, as involuntary

embodiments of identification with imagined collective identities that are

embedded in (contested) colonial histories. When activated through social

relations, they may correspond, in some circumstances and not in others, to a

person’s inner sense of self and belonging.

Too close a focus, in anthropology, on individual choice, risks losing sight

of how external racial categorizations force people against their will “into boxes

of singular identities” (Sen 2006:174). Whether the motivation for doing this is

racist or not, the effect may be the same.

To ask the Cape Verdean women, in my research, which picture they liked

best, constituted an implicit request for them to choose the image they identified

themselves with most; was I not guilty here of fomenting what Sen calls ‘the

illusion of single identity’? Why should the women have to choose at all? To do

so, in response to a research question, generates more questions regarding what

their choices signify. For those who preferred the more African looking woman is

this, for example, because she represents a more authentic identity, unsullied by

western influence? The term badiu was originally used to refer to the slaves who

escaped their Portuguese masters and went to live in remote parts of Santiago

Island. If, on the one hand, they were seen as backward, on the other, they also

represented Cape Verdean resistance to colonial rule. For those who preferred the

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more European looking woman, was this because she represents progress or

modernity? Wealthy black people in Cape Verde have been referred to, in their

local communities as ‘white by money’ (Meintel 1984:98). Meintel’s study

poignantly illustrates how the racial classification system in Cape Verde is made

up of a range of categories, activated in any given moment, according to the

context. Lobban (1995:147) claims that whether Cape Verdeans consider

themselves to be Western Africans, easternmost West Indians or Southern

Europeans “the answers depend on who is asked, when he or she is asked, who is

asking, and what the motivation is for asking in the first place”. The questions and

answers could take many routes.

An interesting route to take, for this discussion, might be to consider

whether asking the women to choose between the two images evoked the

supposed rivalry between sampajudu and badiu referred to above, limiting their

perspectives. Sen (2006:178-9) argues that whilst ‘theorists see themselves as

“discovering” a confrontation, not creating – or adding to –one’, theories do

influence social thought and practice. It is for this reason that deconstructing

racial identifications is a theoretical necessity even if their social effects cannot

always be avoided. In my endeavour to delineate a field of enquiry - constituted

by the category of “Cape Verdean women” - I too became implicated in processes

that activated racial identifications. Perhaps, in the attempt to gain an ‘experience-

near’ analysis of people’s subjectivities, ‘race’ should neither be actively pursued

nor purposefully shunned.

If I had adopted such an attitude, when I presented the images to the Cape

Verdean women, it would have probably led me to ask more open-ended

questions, such as, ‘What do you think of these pictures?’ This could pave the

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way forward for discovering new insights into the multiple allegiances (Sen 2006)

that impact upon Cape Verdean migrant subjectivities. Perhaps the women would

have commented upon the young girl with the plaits in her hair and the stylish

clothes of the more European looking woman which could have generated

discussions on hairstyle and fashion preferences. Was the girl an older daughter?

This could have led to talking about family and gender relations. Even if the

category of ‘race’ had still been activated, this more open-ended approach would

have provided a window into the different kinds of factors that influence the ways

race functions as a category of practice. Personal relationships, for example,

constitute a significant factor (Meintel 1984:98). Pedro’s comments below

illustrate how embodied racial identifications may be played with, within the safe

confines of friendship.

Pedro: There are people who use the word black (preto) as an ugly word, as a discriminating word and there are other cases where they don’t because I have friends who call me preto. Challinor: And you are not offended? Pedro: No, I’m not, because I know them. Challinor: And you can call them “white”? “Hey, white man!” Pedro: Exactly, that is what I do! With a man who is nearly sixty years old; he was in Angola, he was in Mozambique, he has been in Cape Verde, he was in the army...there we are playing, and it is different. But if the first time I see someone they call me preto, someone with whom I don’t have much intimacy or whom I don’t know very well, then I take this as an offence...

That Pedro should be able to develop a close friendship with a ‘white’ man

who had fought in the Portuguese colonial wars suggests that he was free from the

colonial chains of history with their blinding ‘illusion of destiny’ (Sen 2006). To

question the freedom people may have to choose their identity, should not blind us

to the relative freedom people may exercise ‘regarding what priority to give to the

various identities’ (Sen 2006:38) that shape their individual subjectivities.

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The Cape Verdeans in my study did not refer to themselves as an ethnic

group. They classified themselves in terms of a national Cape Verdean identity

often referring to themselves as ‘African immigrants’. Within the context of this

study, ethnicity does not function as a category of practice and consequently

serves as an analytical concept to investigate the processes through which

collective social identities emerge. It keeps me at a comfortable disembodied

distance from the subjects of my study. The same cannot be said of ‘race’. Its

pervasiveness as a category of practice implicates researcher and researched alike.

I am in agreement with Hirschman (2004: 410) that “Race without racism is an

anachronism”. Yet, even as we dismiss it as an analytical concept, we should not

rob it of its political potential to foment the kind of critical reflection – in the

battle against racist ideas and behaviours, including those unmotivated by racist

intent – that promotes ‘priority of reason’ and ‘freedom to think’ about the

relationship between an individual’s personal and collective identities (Sen

2006:161, 170). This, in my opinion, is what Pedro was trying to do in his

confrontations with his Portuguese work colleague. Seen from this perspective,

the more we reason about the implications of using the four lettered word, the

better.

Acknowledgements

Research funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) Portugal. I am

grateful to: Kesha Fikes, Charmaine Crawford, Miguel Vale de Almeida, Jeremias

Carvalho and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments; James Beard for

showing me around Porto and Ana Araújo for producing the image of an African mother.

Notes

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1 I thank Charmaine Crawford for drawing attention to this.

2 Movement for Democracy

3 African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde

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References

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DESAI, PHILLY 1999 ‘Spaces of Identity, Cultures of Conflict: the Development

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ELIZABETH CHALLINOR is associate researcher at the Centre for Research in

Anthropology (CRIA) at the University of Minho.

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ADDRESS: Avenida das Forças Armadas. Ed. ISCTE-IUL 1649-026, Lisboa,

Portugal. Email: [email protected]

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